{"id":277877,"date":"2024-10-28T12:00:51","date_gmt":"2024-10-28T12:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=277877"},"modified":"2024-10-22T06:30:26","modified_gmt":"2024-10-22T05:30:26","slug":"to-apolitical-intellectuals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/10\/to-apolitical-intellectuals\/","title":{"rendered":"To Apolitical Intellectuals"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><em>Otto Ren\u00e9 Castillo (1934\u20131967), whose beautiful poems were inspired by the El Salvadoran guerrilla poet Roque Dalton (1935\u20131975), wrote this elegy two years before he was murdered alongside his comrades.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">I<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">One day,<br \/>\nthe apolitical<br \/>\nintellectuals<br \/>\nof my country<br \/>\nwill be interrogated<br \/>\nby the humblest<br \/>\nof our people.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">They will be asked<br \/>\nwhat they did<br \/>\nwhen<br \/>\ntheir homeland was slowly<br \/>\nextinguished,<br \/>\nlike a sweet fire,<br \/>\nsmall and alone.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">No one will ask them<br \/>\nabout their suits,<br \/>\nor about their long<br \/>\nsiestas<br \/>\nafter lunch,<br \/>\nor about their sterile<br \/>\nbattles with nothingness,<br \/>\nnor about<br \/>\ntheir ontological<br \/>\nway<br \/>\nof making money.<br \/>\nThey won\u2019t be questioned<br \/>\nabout Greek mythology,<br \/>\nor about the self-disgust they felt<br \/>\nwhen someone, deep down,<br \/>\naccepted the fate of dying a coward\u2019s death.<br \/>\nThey\u2019ll be asked nothing<br \/>\nabout their absurd<br \/>\njustifications,<br \/>\nborn in the shadow<br \/>\nof a total lie.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">II<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">On that day<br \/>\nthe humble people will come.<br \/>\nThose who had no place<br \/>\nin the books and poems<br \/>\nof the apolitical intellectuals,<br \/>\nyet, every day, brought them<br \/>\ntheir bread and milk,<br \/>\ntheir eggs and tortillas,<br \/>\nthose who mended their clothes,<br \/>\nwho drove their cars,<br \/>\nwho cared for their dogs and tended their gardens,<br \/>\nwho worked for them,<br \/>\nand they\u2019ll ask:<br \/>\n\u2018What did you do when the poor<br \/>\nsuffered, when the tenderness and life<br \/>\nwas snuffed out of them?\u2019.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">III<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">Apolitical intellectuals<br \/>\nof my sweet country,<br \/>\nyou will have nothing to say.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">A vulture of silence<br \/>\nwill devour your insides.<br \/>\nYour own misery<br \/>\nwill gnaw at your soul.<br \/>\nAnd you will be silent,<br \/>\nashamed of yourselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Otto Ren\u00e9 Castillo (1934\u20131967), whose beautiful poems were inspired by the El Salvadoran guerrilla poet Roque Dalton (1935\u20131975), wrote this elegy two years before he was murdered alongside his comrades.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":115817,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[182],"tags":[229,2754,555,868,109],"class_list":["post-277877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry-format","tag-activism","tag-direct-action","tag-elites","tag-poetry","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277877"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":277878,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277877\/revisions\/277878"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}